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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27967859">To Sleep is to Die</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chianine/pseuds/Chianine'>Chianine</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>1st Century CE RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:14:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,049</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27967859</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chianine/pseuds/Chianine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Pliny the Elder/Titus Flavius Vespasianus | Emperor Titus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>To Sleep is to Die</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aeroscope/gifts">Aeroscope</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Death is in the air.</p>
<p>It rises to the east, in the direction of Vesuvius, across the normally tranquil Bay of Naples. Gauis Plinius Secundus stands on a hill in Misenum and squints in its direction. He can hear the panicked voices of the slaves and peasants, expressing the fear that he’s already beating down into the darkest recesses of his heart.</p>
<p>He is naked, and the same wind that brings death and fear kisses his skin and chills him. His eyes are insensible to what they behold.</p>
<p>A pillar - nay, a door, grim and great, stands suspended in the heavens. No door, but only a gate could be this massive. Perhaps opening to the eternal city of Dis, man’s true and eternal home, the vision twists again into the stipe of a treacherous mushroom, its poison already strangling him.</p>
<p>The soft, corpulent man coughs and two slaves step near. He flings his arms backward to fend them off, still contemplating this vision before him. He struggles to believe in such a supernatural sight, ridiculous like the walking trees of the Chalci but devastating in meaning like the ghostly cries that haunt the forests of Teutoberg. A tree indeed would be the best description of the unearthly sight. A great umbrella pine, standing high on invisible stilts, was shading the bay with its smothering cloud of Death.</p>
<p>“Well, what is it, Gaius?” A heavy and heavily-perfumed matron stands behind him. It is his sister, Plinia. That he has no answer for her is less bothersome than the anxiety in her tone. </p>
<p>“That is what I shall have to discover,” he says, turning his glance to where his fleet crusts the nearby coast. Whatever the catastrophe, as admiral, he would be expected to represent the empire, and more importantly, <i>the emperor.</i></p>
<p>As his asthmatic health routines will not go forward today, Gaius Plinius Secundus begins to descend the hill, still naked. His slaves run after him, tossing his robe about his nudity as best they can as his sister continues to ply him with questions and exhortations. She wants to know where he was going and whether it will be safe for her son to go with him.</p>
<p>“No,” he answers without forming any idea of his plans. He stops and turns to her. “It will not be safe, dear sister,” he takes her shoulders in his hands and gazes into her watery, worried eyes. “Keep your sweet boy safe here with you.”</p>
<p>“But will he make a poor showing? I mean, if he is not there with you, beside you, taking part in the danger as, as a son, think of Titus and Vespasian…”</p>
<p>Plinius inhales sharply at the comparison and sets his jaw. The slaves gasp. Even Plinia can see her mistake.</p>
<p>“I meant no, I meant no disrespect Gaius. You must know that -”</p>
<p>Pliny brusquely clears his throat. “You will keep your son safe here with you today, Plinia. That is my wish. I gave him some Greek translations I want completed for my supper with the tribunes next week. He can serve me best by completing the first draft.”</p>
<p>
  <i>Think of Titus,</i> she says. <i>The fool. As if an hour goes by that I don’t think of my prince. As all men rightly should.</i>
</p>
<p>His sister is offering a terse bow in submission as a wild-eyed stranger is led into his presence. </p>
<p>Odon announces him: a messenger from the house of Tascius in Herculeneum. His wife Rectina sent him in desperate haste. The man steps forward, a fine layer of ash covering him and reddening his wide awestruck eyes.</p>
<p>He opens his mouth and Hell comes out of it.</p>
<p>While no literal truth can be ascribed to stories of liquid fire, tidal waves of black burning pitch and stones raining from the heavens, the need for rescue is clear enough.</p>
<p>First sending his tribunes to ready the quadriremes, he then turns to his personal aids. This will be a rescue operation first, of course, but both his literary posterity and the glory of the Empire demand a detailed description of the day’s events. Without men like him, history would be recorded by the fools and women who live it and fill it with lies and exaggeration to assuage their base need for constant novelty. Tascius’ man has already filled the tribunes’ heads with enough twaddle to disappoint the troops upon arrival. The only positive result of this overreaction thus far has been avoiding his mewling nephew’s accompaniment: Plinia has fled the scene.</p>
<p>“Odon, Spetius!”</p>
<p>The two slaves are standing right beside him, which he realizes even as he shouts their names. It’s an old habit of his. He can’t be bothered wasting the time to look around and see if they’re near; he simply shouts for them any time he isn’t immediately aware of them. </p>
<p>“Bring all the necessary materials: the ink and scrolls, the measuring and viewing devices, and don’t forget the <i>ferrets</i>.”</p>
<p>“Of course, sir.”</p>
<p>His ferrets have undergone an extensive selection and training process but have yet to be tested. He has recently proved the superior intelligence of ferrets to cats by offering each a morsel of food tainted with sulfur. Only the cat licked at the morsel, proving its stupidity. The ferret, therefore, is the optimal creature for volcanic testing.</p>
<p>The question of volcanic activity in the area has long been a controversial issue. The rich, fertile soil speaks to such activity in the past, but excellent dating techniques (ferrets)  have assured citizens that the volcano is long extinct. Lately, frequent earthquakes have the peasants grumbling again. Of course, nobody wants to die in a volcanic eruption but did they expect that the agricultural resources of Campania should be neglected? It was their duty to the Emperor to work the lands that provide sustenance for the people of Rome, not offer their geologic theories. Besides, Pliny’s own work on the subject has demonstrated that earthquakes have nothing whatsoever to do with volcanic activity. Earthquakes are a sort of geologic flatulence, the result of hot and cold air streams colliding within the earth’s bowels. Today he would have to defend the conclusions of his superior research to the imbecility of peasants’ eyes. Like women, they always believe that things are exactly as they seem, without accounting for the complicated processes that escape their notice, like geologic flatulence.</p>
<p>As the ferrets are loaded and the fleet is readied, Plinius decides to snatch a few moments of rest. His quarters are kept dark and quiet, allowing him to revive himself with his famous naps at any moment in the day when he finds himself needing one. </p>
<p>From the dim silence of his room, he can hear elsewhere in the villa his nephew reciting in perfect Greek the translation Plinius himself had assigned him. <i>Excellent,</i> he thinks, yet still finding it curious that the boy could focus during such excitement. <i>Not like you at that age, my prince. Wild horses couldn’t keep you from the rescue of any innocent, regardless the danger.</i> </p>
<p>The Emperor is never far from his mind. <i>The Emperor,</i> he thinks again, savoring the recent memory of Titus’ worthy head encircled by the diadem only three months earlier. <i>That I have lived to see you crowned is enough for me to die satisfied.</i> Most men will live their whole lives without seeing a good man wield power, let alone a true prince in heart and mind, and a friend to boot.</p>
<p>Plinius smiles, as the vision in his mind shifts from Titus in his diadem to young Titus on horseback, chomping at the bit himself to go after a rogue band of Chatti who had attacked some locals from the colonia for trading with the Romans. He felt such passion to protect. <i>A natural father. A natural leader.</i></p>
<p>I had come to expect such from you at that point. We had met in Germania, on the road to Vetera. Passing through the forest Teutoberg, I sensed a melancholy in you that was not shared by your comrades. You mourned your lost brethren, the legions of Varus, though you had never met them. I rode up beside you and saw your raw and glassy eyes.</p>
<p>“Are you well?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Only the smell of sulfur, burning my patriotic eyes,” you said, righteously insulted that I had interrupted your reverie. You rode off briskly, and I was ashamed.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Rectina’s man insists that Herculeneum can be reached by ship and that the city’s inmates are eagerly awaiting rescue. They will be waiting a long time.</p>
<p>The quadriremes roll on the sea, surrounded by a species of stone that behaves devilishly like foam. Falling from the sky and floating on the growing waves, the porous rocks strike against each other and create an unearthly song. White smoke rises from the nauseating waves and black smoke pours in over the tops of them, originating from some distant yet no doubt equally awful source.</p>
<p>Plinius stands on deck in command of his fleet, a statue among terrified men. His aids are scribbling beneath their hoods, and soldiers scamper to and fro, shielding themselves from falling debris with their hands and arms. There is no visibility in the direction of Herculeneum. Rectina and her people will die. He says so to his men.</p>
<p>The helmsman is relieved by Plinius’ pronouncement. He begins instructing his men to prepare a return to Misenum when Plinius, enraged, grabs the man’s coat and shouts at him, “Have I ordered a retreat? Have I?”</p>
<p>Plinius knows he is shaking. He knows he is coughing and gasping for air. He has lost his composure not out of fear, but disgust. “We cannot make for land at Herculeneum, no, but we will not abandon our countrymen so soon. We will make for land at Stabiae! <i>Fortune favors the brave!</i>”</p>
<p>The helmsman looks stunned. No matter, his men are already repeating Plinius’ last words, beating at the falling pumice with their swords. </p>
<p>Was this Pluto’s war against mankind? Were these stones his missiles? Light in weight because they oppose everything that is true in the world of the living? Had the lost legions returned, the dead, betrayed, forgotten warriors of Teutoberg, pouring out of the mouth of Vesuvius like infant spiders from an egg sac, come in anger to avenge Rome for not avenging them? </p>
<p> </p>
<p>After your rebuff in the forest, I kept my distance. You were a bright star even then at eighteen, your father Vespasian being the most capable and virtuous man in the empire and yourself his heir and likeness.</p>
<p>Well, not quite his likeness. Your face had not the plebeian, punched quality of your father’s. You could not be called fair, though you had your admirers, men and women alike. You had been at the center of more than a few rumors during your time in the imperial palace. Raised and educated at court with Britannicus, Caesar’s son and heir, you had always been intended for greatness; every man in the empire knew your name, including myself. </p>
<p>But I had not expected to find you so <i>great at heart</i>. I had not expected to find a boy, nay a man, who felt the loss of each fellow soldier like an injury to himself. What I did not know about you yet is your paradoxical love of peace, so rare in a fighting man. </p>
<p>The Pax Romana, so sacred to you, had been broken by Arminius fifty years before when he led his troops in rebellion against Rome, cutting three whole legions to pieces there in the narrow paths of the dark forest. Germanicus had done his best to restore our honor, before Tiberius forbade any further campaigning against Arminius and his successors. We left the common people of those regions to fend for themselves against the bloodthirsty tribes, and the sacrifices of our ancestors forgotten.</p>
<p>We forgot that Campaign is not about vainglory but duty: the duty to spread civilization and peaceful enterprise to the far corners of the earth. Victory is not a choice, but our existential purpose. In your hands and in your father’s, we have returned to the greatness of the Divine Augustus. It was to him I prayed, on that day in the Teutoberg, that your great heart would not be wasted. I admired you though I felt unworthy and embarrassed. I had never felt that way about any man, let alone one half my age. It was not the first time you would surprise me, as well as the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The man Pomponianus is a fool. </p>
<p>Plinius watches as the terrified senator loads his heavy silver service onto the ship. Judging from the discolored section of toga sticking to his thigh, the patrician’s bladder has erupted even if the volcano hasn’t. A part of him must know he will die still he is more concerned that his riches be kept safe from peasants than settling his spiritual debts with this life. Even as the sea fills with pumice, Pomponianus loads a ship going nowhere.</p>
<p>After his bath, Plinius feels his appetite aroused. Pomponianus and his people were quite shocked by his request for the bathroom and he hoped his host would take the hint to join him but it fell on deaf and panicked ears. It seems that he will spend his final meal smelling a grown man’s piss. Plinius laughs. At least he will not have to bother with the silver service.</p>
<p>He has avoided pointless luxuries most his life and can remember the few occasions he has been forced to eat off silver. Most memorably when stationed in Germania, under the governorship of Pompeius. He hauled 12,000 pounds of silver from camp to camp, wasting unknown resources and time. In the praetorium at Castra Vetera the heavy glinting rubbish blinded our tired soldier’s eyes at the tribune’s dinner. I complained of the extravagance, and you replied that it was no extravagance, it was barely enough to accommodate the size of Pompeius’ pole. I laughed in spite of myself. </p>
<p>That was months after you had approached me and apologized for the words we exchanged in Teutoberg. I had been mentioned to you by my good friend Corbulo, and you had an interest in my research on the use of missiles on horseback. You had such strong opinions on the subject, my dear boy, of which I hated to disabuse you. </p>
<p>Waste being commonplace in Nero's time, that autumn Pompeius wined and dined the officers every night in his praetorum. We had settled a treaty with local tribes that guaranteed a quiet and peaceful winter, perfect for completing the <i> De jaculatione equestri</i>. Pompeius knew of my low estimation of him and although I was a senior cavalry battalion commander, saw fit to assign me a domus with a junior tribune, the notorious Titus Vespasianus.</p>
<p>That I was sixteen years your senior was clearly meant to be an insult to me, and it would have been had your father not been the great Vespasian. Many believed he had pulled strings to have me near you to curb you of your riotous living. The dear man could never have guessed that his son would induce me into it.</p>
<p>How did it all start, you naughty boy, you incorrigible child? Was it you “testing” the hypocaust floor with your nudity, or the time you asked me how Greek my family’s roots were using the very suggestive term <i>mos Graecorum.</i> Our domus being situated directly next to the thermae, I spent nights listening to the illicit meetings of soldiers, which distracted and anguished me. I could not read, I could not write, I could not sleep for tossing and turning.</p>
<p>You, you rough and ugly kitten, lying there with your full round belly protruding, you would poke me with your dirty toe and invite me to join you next door. One night you finally climbed into my bed and showed me what you meant by <i>mos Graeciae</i>. You led my aching rod between your soft thighs and rocked ever so gently against me until I erupted like a ripe grape pressed between two fingers. </p>
<p>We were alone like this many nights. I felt no shame or loss of virtue at the time. Only years later, when I heard of your catamites and concubines, did I regret not being a better influence on you. Even then I could not forget the warmth of your hard kisses.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Eggs, grapes, and olives will be his final meal, Plinius realizes. This is ideal for a good Roman and he has Odon take note if it. As the company eats, the sky thickens with ash. They watch flames leaping off the top of Vesuvius. </p>
<p>“Never fear,” Plinius says, popping another olive into his mouth. “The peasants want you to fear for your lives so you will run off and leave your silver service to their greed. You are only witnessing their clever bonfires, meant to fool you.”</p>
<p>Pomponianus looks especially heartened. The company rests a short while in nervous silence until the fools lighting fires on Vesuvius can no longer be seen. It is only as Plinius begins to feel drowsy that terror strikes him. To sleep is to die, and the emperor has never needed him awake and alert more than now. The ferrets must be tended.</p>
<p>Fashioning soft helmets from pillows and straps Plinius orders Odon and Spetius out into the hot, white, flurry. Realizing that they may be entombed by the debris they fear being struck by, Pomponianus and the others follow him out, choosing the cleaner death. They must visit the ferrets to check their breathing patterns. His own, he doesn’t admit, is failing him.</p>
<p>Not the ferrets, or the ship, or even his hand in front of his face can be seen however. The dawn has been cancelled and taken all light and color with it. He collapses. The air has no light or oxygen. Odon and Spetius don't attempt to lift him, but lie by his side. No he feels fear, but can do nothing. The sound fades, as well as the scent of sulfur. His lungs expand and contract, but to no avail. The darkness enveloping him reaches inside and for the first and last time, takes him without permission.</p>
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